Artist Profile Series 24: Flannery O' Connor

Flannery O’ Connor was a Southern, fiction writer and essayist born March 25th 1925 in Savannah, Georgia.  She was a devout Roman Catholic with a penchant for satire, dark humor and wild, religious imagination. Today, O’Connor is considered to be one of America’s greatest fiction writers and an apologist for the Catholic faith. Her stories are far from what you might imagine coming from a Southern Christian writer in the 1950’s. They are full of shocking scenes of violence, depravity and shady, sometimes comic Christian characters such as a bible salesman who steals a prosthetic leg or a pseudo-prophet who steals mummified dwarfs.  Her character’s twisted views of reality warps the basic tenets of the faith they profess. Their situations often end in bloodshed.